Creative Medium Butterflies

I have a thing for butterflies. I have complete admiration for a creature that goes through an extreme metamorphosis to become something delicate and beautiful. For me, butterflies are the epitome of Mother Nature's magic. My inspiration for this card came from an afternoon spent at the butterfly exhibit at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. I no sooner walked into the exhibit when a butterfly fluttered near only to land on my hand. It stayed there for the next 45 minutes while I walked around admiring the foliage and the various species of butterflies flitting around. Definitely magical.

I began this project with a 4 x 5.25 piece of purple cardstock. Using a stencil and a sponge dipped in silver Delicata ink, I created the square maze for the background.

Stencils are so easy to use and offer up so many possibilities in the crafting world.

I love the shimmer that the silver Delicata ink lends to the background. It's a rich, thick ink that really stands out.

Next, I used a different stencil and Imagine Crafts Creative Medium in iridescent purple. I used painters tape to mask off parts of the stencil to avoid accidentally stenciling where I didn't want to.

Creative Medium is wonderful stuff! It's and acrylic medium, about the consistency of peanut butter, that spreads on easily with a palette knife.

Once done, I carefully lifted off the stencil and there were three iridescent butterflies!

I let the butterflies dry and then repeated the stenciling process using the stencil, my palette knife, and the Creative Medium. You can see how the butterflies have begun to dry and really show that iridescent sheen, while some of the wet circles still look a little more like paste.

I wanted to give the piece movement, so I made another butterfly to give the piece some air. I began with an old scrap of sheet music which I spread very lightly with the Creative Medium to carry that same iridescent shimmer.

When it was dry, I stamped it with a butterfly using StazOn Gothic Purple ink. 

Then I cut out the butterfly and attached it to my background piece.

All that was left to do was to mount the piece on a card backing and send it flitting on its way to brighten someone's day.

This card took a couple of hours to complete, but only because of the drying time needed. Actual time spent making it was about 20 minutes. This is something that a beginner could easily do!

Imagine Crafts / Tsukineko Products Used

• Creative Medium - Iridescent Purple
• Delicata Ink Pad - Silver
• StazOn Ink Pad - Gothic Purple
• Palette Knife

Other Products Used

• Stencils by The Crafter's Workshop
• Sponge
• Purple cardstock
• Sheet music scrap
• Beacon 3-in-1 Glue
• Butterfly rubber stamp by Finnabair

The Whimsical World of Art

There is a word that I love (just one of many, if you know me at all).

That word is:

whimsical
/adjective

1. spontaneously fanciful or playful
2. given to whims; capricious
3. quaint, unusual, or fantastic

It's a word that doesn't get used nearly enough.

In the art world, in my humble opinion, it's a concept that doesn't get used nearly enough.

Don't get me wrong. I admire "serious" art, and especially the skill it takes to produce it. However, as someone who appreciates art, it's always the more whimsical stuff that draws my eye.

After all, where else in our lives can we completely give ourselves over to whimsy if not in art? In art, it's acceptable to have a chartreuse sky, swimming camels... anything that doesn't quite belong in all the most amusing ways.

Truly, art should be spontaneously fanciful and playful. Art should be capricious and given to whims. Art is at its best when it is quaint, unusual or fantastic. Art ought to be whimsical.

So it is there that my love of RubberMoon's stamps is based. They make it easy to wander the whimsical path.

The card above was made using RubberMoon's Squeak, "Oh, Rats!", and Black Cattitude stamps, along with Tim Holtz's clock stamp.

The concept behind this card perfectly, yet oh, so whimsically captures my behind-the-eight-ball frantic feeling with regard toward getting everything done between Halloween and Christmas.

Hey, what day is it? Wait. What time is it?! Oh, rats!!

The rats race around the clock (rat race... get it?) as if trying to keep up with time, capped off by the wry look on the cat's face as one of the rats gets away.

Here I am at my last post on this blog for 2014, with holiday presents made and gifted, cards made and sent, cookies made and eaten, well-wishes bestowed upon beloved family and friends...

...but for this final wish...

May you have a very 

Happily Whimsical New Year!

Paper Tiger

 I'm posting again for the Fitztown Design Team. What inspired me this week? A pile of crumpled napkins. *shrug* It's how I roll.

I submit for your review, the basic brown paper napkin. Dining and coffee establishments love to give everyone copious quantities of them. In my life, there is always a bunch of these things hanging around - jammed into my purse, stuck between pages of books as a marker, tossed aside on an end table - until I finally get tired of seeing them or digging around them and toss them.

Toss them? Not this time and probably never again! I went with, "Hmmm... crafting possibilities...?" So I taped one to a piece of printer paper to give it stability and printed out Fitztown's tiger (available here) on it.

So far, so good. Now what...? I decided to see if I could color on it without ripping it and see if I could then maybe decoupage it onto a blank coaster. I experimented with different mediums on a spare napkin. With dozens of them in residence, it wasn't too painful to sacrifice one. Some of the mediums I tried were too wet and tore the napkin or bled too much. So, I went (very gently) with crayons, a blender pen with distress ink for the leaves, and a white ballpoint pen to give ol' Tony some contrast.

Next up, I got out a blank coaster (this one is a 3.5" square) and my Liquitex gloss gel (I use the medium thickness). I also ripped the napkin down to an easier to manage size at this point.

I turned the napkin over and applied a coat of the Liquitex gel to the back of the image, coating only the image and not outside of it. I flipped it over again and adhered it to the coaster. I applied more Liquitex gel to the top of the image going slightly outside of the image, since my intention was to be able to rip away excess napkin.

As you can see, I used my finger to apply the Liquitex gel both to the back and the front of the image. I like getting messy. Plus, I find that I can control what I'm doing better by being completely "hands-on". But, for those of you who don't like to get messy, you could easily use a sponge or a brush - just be really careful not to tear the napkin.

Once the piece was mostly dry, I carefully tore away excess napkin. Then I swiped some of Ranger's Tarnished Brass Distress Stain around the edges and sponged over that in a scrubbing motion using Ranger's Crushed Olive Distress Ink. Finally, I went over the entire piece again with the Liquitex gel.

The piece seemed too dark to me and I wanted to lighten it up and give it a little extra interest. So, I used StazOn Opaque White and an old background stamp that I got from who-knows-where and stamped around the tiger.

And that, as they say, is that. I know it seems like a long, complicated process, but it really wasn't. Waiting for it to dry in between gel applications got a little tiresome, but that's what goofing around on Facebook is for... isn't it?

Look around you. Look at the stuff you normally toss out and try to come up with something creative to do with it instead. Let me know what you come up with.

Viva Las Vegas Stamps - August Challenge

There I was, complaining about the Summer heat (as usual). I was trying to find a way to distract myself from my sweaty puddle of discomfort when I saw the August challenge over at the Viva Las VegasStamps blog. I decided to play along. The prompt was the color orange, and summer and girls and well, pretty much anything goes. So I designed the above card using three different VLVS stamps:
Leapfrog Lady
Diving Lady
and the quote.

I stamped the images and quote using StaZon Jet Black Ink on glossy white cardstock. Then I colored in the images with water-based markers and sponged around the edges with an orange-y water-based ink. Just to add some bling - because that's how I roll - I "colored in" the diving woman's top with yellow Stickles.

It should be noted that I have been a huge fan of Viva Las VegasStamps practically since the day I began stamping. They offer tens of thousands of different stamps. Really. They cater to every rubber stamp need you can imagine, including my own penchant for sarcastic and whimsical stuff. They also have a great variety of naughty stamps - as naughty as you can think it. I'm a fan of that, too. Go figure.

In 2006, a couple of years after I'd fallen headlong into the addictive world of rubber stamps, I was fortunate to meet up with a group of friends for a rubber stamp convention in Las Vegas. One afternoon, we ditched the convention and made the trip to the VLVS store. I am not joking at all when I say that the place is a stamper's wonderland. My friends and I happily fell down that rabbit hole and whiled away that entire afternoon looking at rubber stamps. It goes on record as one of the top ten afternoons of my life and it's probably why I can't use a VLVS stamp without breaking into a somewhat enigmatic grin.

After all, I'm trying to not take this non-permanent life so seriously. Rubber stamps help.